SF filmmaking scene August ’26 (7 shorts, 3 features): shorts • @bephrem is executive producing 3 live-action shorts via svfilm.fund (2 in development, 1 announced) • @donaldjewkes is developing an animated short/series (recently backed by @osvllc) • @anupamsidhant is in post-production on a satire featurette • @brandonkachen is in development on the first part of a 3-part romance based in San Francisco • @bephrem is writing a short film based in San Francisco w/ a Taiwanese-American founder protagonist (developing since April, finishing 2nd draft) features • “Again, Tomorrow” by @nikhilganesh001 has stopped development • @jasonjoyride is in production on a book adaptation (w/ @InfiniteF8lms) and developing a sci-fi trilogy • @GeffenAvraham is developing a sci-fi feature (3m trailer in post-production) directors are quietly leaving, quitting, or getting absorbed into the industry. the solution is to fund them. I have moved $25k (allocated $80k) to tech interior & adjacent writer-directors creating cinema.

it seems LA is where worlds get built and SF is where the world gets built

Most films capture a performance from one angle at a time. @dimitrivallein surrounds his actors with about 200 synchronized cameras and reconstructs them in three dimensions, so you can walk around the performance instead of watching it from a fixed seat. He's using it to finish The Day I Met You, a science fiction short that brings quantum physics into an intimate story about love, choice and the nature of reality. It's built for cinema screens and for virtual reality. Over the next year he'll complete it and pursue an international festival premiere. His animated shorts have earned more than 40 international festival selections. Before this he built augmented reality work for Netflix and Dua Lipa that drew hundreds of millions of views. He's now building Revery, an entertainment company making original stories for film, games and immersive formats. "I want to make beautiful films that bring our most extraordinary scientific and philosophical ideas into popular culture." He's the twenty-third O'Shaughnessy Fellow we've announced in 2026.

this holiday season will be the first since the AI boom started that many will privately reckon with their life direction now that the models are remarkably good.

The World is Changing: AI For Creativity By Jeffrey Katzenberg A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe. Later that day, I received a text from an artist I've known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: "Is this the end of us?" My answer was, "Certainly not.” I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both. In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious. There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I've spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn't quite right. I've sat in screening rooms where four years of people's labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there's really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love. People do not fight this hard for things they don't care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft. Is History Repeating Itself? The history here is more complicated than either side may realize. In 1906, the most famous composer in America, John Philip Sousa, published an essay titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music." He warned that the phonograph would become "a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul." Sousa's fight was not really about the machine, it was about money. The machines were playing his compositions, and the men who built them weren't paying him a cent. His campaign helped create the Copyright Act of 1909. He did not stop the technology. He changed the terms under which it could use his work. A hundred years ago, sound came to the movies. We remember it now as a miracle, and it was. What we forget is who paid for it. Before sound, tens of thousands of musicians made their living in the orchestra pits of movie houses, scoring every film live, every night, in towns all over the world. When the soundtrack arrived, the work of one composer and one orchestra was recorded for a film that went into thousands of theaters. The union fought back with everything it had, taking out newspaper ads across the country warning against the menace of "canned music," one of them showing a mechanical man tearing the strings out of a harp while an angel wept. They were not fools, and they were not Luddites. They were right. Those pit jobs did not come back. And yet (this is the part we have to be brave enough to admit), sound gave us the movie musical, the modern score, sfx, sound design, audio engineering, and an art form vastly larger than the one it disrupted. And it helped keep Hollywood in the forefront of world entertainment for the rest of the century and into the next. The loss was real. And yet the art form expanded. This is a story that has been told over and over again. To resist technology is to risk irrelevance. Just look at Kodak or Blockbuster. To embrace technology is to open doors of new possibility. Just consider Apple and Netflix. What I Learned From Walt Disney In the mid-1980s, I was tapped to lead Disney's animation division at a moment when the studio was at an inflection point. Animation wasn't just another business unit. It was the soul of the company, a medium revered because of Walt's genius and his passion. But the production system was cumbersome and unforgiving. A single movie was 125,000 individual hand-drawn and painted cels, photographed one frame at a time. Every revision carried a cost measured in months. These degrees of difficulty shaped the kinds of stories we could tell. We found our way forward in an unexpected place: Walt himself. The Disney archives held astonishing recordings of Walt explaining his creative process. His own writings. His notes and storyboards. Work product captured at every stage of his process. This was truly a gift. Listening, reading, sitting with the work itself, we heard him talk about character, about emotion, about how an audience feels when a character truly comes alive. He talked about making bold choices and refining a scene until it genuinely moved people. We didn't hear a word about pencils or paintbrushes. In fact, Walt was famous for being a technologist, forever hunting for state-of-the-art tools, often inventing them himself to achieve the images he saw in his head. But he never defined animation by the tools. He defined it by whether the audience believed the character. His principles were timeless. The tools were not. That realization changed everything. We co-developed the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) with a young Northern California company called Pixar, replacing hand-painted cels with CGI. In The Little Mermaid, the final scene shimmered with a dimensionality and light that the old process simply couldn't achieve. In Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom sequence moved with a cinematic sweep that placed the audience inside the emotion of the moment. In Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders felt vast and alive, and the Magic Carpet became an intricate, compelling character all its own. In The Lion King, the stampede carried a scale and intensity that raised the emotional stakes beyond anything we'd done before. Technology didn't diminish the craft, it expanded the canvas. It gave artists more room to create. A decade later, the canvas expanded again. When Disney released Pixar's Toy Story, it wasn't simply a technical milestone. It was proof that a fully computer-animated film could carry real emotional weight, that it could make audiences laugh, cry, and believe. At DreamWorks, we made the difficult decision to sunset hand-drawn animation and become a fully computer-animated studio. It was the right thing to do, but it was not without pain. It cost talented people their place in an industry where they had worked their whole lives. Some made the leap to the new tools and did the finest work of their careers. Some never did. Tools are never the point. The instruments change with every generation. What endures is taste and imagination. The magical ability to make an audience feel. One of the greatest storytellers of our generation, George Lucas, succinctly captured the eternal essence of this issue: “It’s not the how, it’s the why.” A Distinction With a Difference I asked one of the leading AI models a question that has been challenging me for months. What is the difference between reasoning and creating? Its answer changed how I think about almost everything happening in this industry. It said . . . Reasoning and creating are two distinct cognitive modes, though they also work together. Reasoning is fundamentally evaluative and analytical. It operates on what already exists: facts, premises, evidence. It moves toward a conclusion that was in a sense already implied by the input. Reasoning is constrained by logic and truth. Its goal is to arrive somewhere correct, not to invent somewhere new. Creating is fundamentally generative. It produces something that didn't exist before. And crucially, there's no single right answer waiting to be found. A blank page has infinite valid responses. Creation involves choices that can't be fully justified by logic alone. Taste, intuition and vision fill the gap where deduction runs out. Reasoning is what Silicon Valley has been perfecting. Creating is what Hollywood has been practicing for more than a century. AI today operates almost entirely on the reasoning side of the line. It can deduce, evaluate, optimize, and pattern-match brilliantly. And while it can create, there is a real distinction to being creative. What it doesn’t yet have is those things that make us human: empathy, devotion, serendipity, the kind of creativity that comes from a person trying to say something only they could say. When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done. By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new. One day, AI may close this gap. Three years ago, the leaders building AI would have called what they are achieving today, improbable, if not impossible. Impossible is no longer improbable. Today, the line between reasoning and creating is real. Even the leading technologists acknowledge we are not there yet. There is no scientific path to crossing this divide that anyone in the field can articulate today. Understanding that gap is where we will find common ground. A Path Forward In 2016, I closed one chapter in Hollywood with the sale of DreamWorks and opened another in Northern California, co-founding WndrCo. We’ve backed more than 50 founders building the next generation of technology and watched how breakthroughs in Silicon Valley emerge, first as experiments, then as platforms, and finally as infrastructure that reshapes entire industries. It's worth remembering that the last great revolution in animation also came from the north. Pixar was a Northern California company, forged not in the conventions of the Hollywood studio system, but in the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. I've spent years on both sides of this bridge. For sure, I don’t have all the answers (take Quibi, for one!). But, from my past and present vantage points of my long career, here is what I see . . . Brilliant people in Northern California building this technology have made something extraordinary. They have earned the right for the rest of us to be, if not believers, at least optimistic that what comes next will be remarkable. But they have not made an artist. The tools are powerful, but they are not what makes a story matter. That knowledge lives 350 miles to the south, inside people whose life's work has informed the very models you are building. The right path forward includes them by design, with credit, with consent, and with compensation. Build this with the storytellers. Not on top of them. Taste is not something that can be synthesized, it is uniquely human. At the same time, Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away. The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything. The north needs something from it that they cannot build and cannot buy: creativity. The kind that takes a blank page and conjures a single right answer where there was none and has held audiences for a century. Without it, the most powerful reasoning engine ever invented will still be missing the only thing that makes a story worth telling. The artists who learn to wield these new instruments will do things the engineers never dreamed of. They always have. Edison invented the motion picture but made terrible movies. It took Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and so many others to make movies emotional. Now, the canvas is about to expand yet again. We should decide now that we intend to paint on it. There are so many valuable lessons in history. This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms. Sousa did not stop the phonograph; he helped write the law that made sure composers got paid. And two years ago, when the writers and the actors walked out, they were fighting for the very things Sousa was fighting for in 1906. Consent, compensation, the basic recognition that human creative work has a price that must be paid. The terms of that fight are still being negotiated, but the principle is older than any of us. The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap. First, we must all agree that there should be terms. Then we can have the crucial debate about what fairness requires. What I Learned From Steve Jobs Years ago, Steve Jobs said, "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." He was describing a device. But he could just as easily have been describing this tale of two cities. What I See Coming Soon As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer. Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling. In the 1980s, animation was dismissed as a niche corner of the business. Today it is one of the most beloved and profitable forms of storytelling in the world. In live action, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson embraced new visual tools not as shortcuts, but as instruments, and expanded cinema in the process. Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process. Assuredly, I don’t have all the answers, but I am confident that the creative opportunities will expand yet again. How we come through this is a choice. The north has the new tools. The south has the creative soul. The best future will draw on the best of both worlds.

I will not pretend to know what most people want, but I can say very confidently that I do not want more personalization. I want a lower barrier to entry so that more people with capital V Vision can show me what they see.

i matched 12,000 launch videos against every rental listing in sf to find out where they were filmed 28 of them are the same building osmo.inc/launchmap?v=2

you can disable Claude from training on your chat history by going to Settings → Privacy → disable “Help improve our AI models” for ChatGPT Settings → Data controls → disable “Improve the model for everyone” both are on by default

stumbled on @tastelabs “Taste Makers” community (portal.tastelabs.com), with a lot of conveniently forward-sounding market language — “Help shape the future of AI” — “real projects with top tech companies and AI labs” — “we run a range of design projects” — “where your taste shapes AI.” — A private community, events. (!) — “work from anywhere, on your own schedule.” “Join our mission to end AI slop.” seems to be a convenient slogan to hide behind for the farming of craft people’s data. I don’t know if I would have written this page differently, but it just gives me chills because I can see right through it.

9.20.26 Noe, spacious. 6 tile wide sidewalks. A stroller and pairs of kids every block. Nearly silent. The streets wide, the air is cooler, the houses are set back. People tending to their 1 car garages. A tense glance, categorizing me, back to work. A pair of parents at the street corner, the base of a hill, deciding which way to walk. The air is silent, dead air, like the city holding its breath. Like watching an illusion in front of me.

a gap I see in gen AI tooling companies marketing is that the past 4 years have been about tool capability. our models can now do this, this, and this. increasingly impressive every quarter. what I have yet to see is marketing focused on one individual, with one irreplaceable voice, saying something no one else can say, using the tools. it’s either those people don’t want to touch the tools, or it isn’t actually solving their actual problem, or the two industries just can’t talk to each other.

the best creative tool is time. patronage buys it, and no company sells it.

We're bringing film back to San Francisco. Since we strengthened our Scene in San Francisco film incentive in February, film and TV production in the city have surged. We permitted 309 productions, which: - Increased spending by 85% to $32.3 million - Employed more than 3,600 local crew members - Generated 5,630 SAG-AFTRA bookings for actors - Accounted for 4,303 hotel room nights Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to visit productions filming across our city and meet the talented crews behind them—many of which would not be here without the legislation we signed. Film creates jobs, generates revenue that powers services residents rely on, and shows off our city to the world. Let's go, San Francisco!

Great directors are once again becoming the main draw for audiences because of the high trust they’ve earned from them (Nolan/The Odyssey, Coogler/Sinners). If I were building a new movie studio, I’d act like a label and sign next generation directors with bold visions (Barker, Parsons, Ullom), back their next 5 movies up to a certain budget size (with option to raise additional capital for more ambitious projects), split IP ownership, give them broad creative control, and build a studio brand off our taste in filmmakers we sign and gain audience trust from the freedom we give them. I’d also take a page out of the Sundance Institute and create an in-house fellowship program to develop new voices we find online and connect it to a micro-budget fund that finances a handful of shorts from each filmmaker we’d post on YouTube free for everyone to watch to grow their audience, and treat the revenue loss as R&D for a future pipeline of filmmakers we’d hopefully want to sign. I’d probably have a branded division to rep our filmmakers in the commercial space and offshoot some of the financial risk of the studio by producing those jobs in-house and taking agency/prod co fees off the top. And I’d have half the marketing team be uniquely focused on growing the personal brands of each filmmaker we’d sign because the entire model relies on their ability to become household names. I left traditional Hollywood years ago because I care more about the hours we spend consuming media online every day than the one movie you see a month, but I love movies and if I ever came back it would probably look something like that.

i've been quietly working on a movie it's my way of processing the times we live in, a coming of age of sorts it's a poetic, feminine, near-future fiction feature i've been learning writing, directing, and film production on the job. we're early in the process. because i'm a beginner with no film portfolio, i want to give my future cast & crew a glimpse of a few scenes as i see them. so i'm doing prototype shoots of core scenes with friends (and myself!) in them these screenshots are from a blocking / prototype shoot of a scene called 'bloodline'. no ai, no edits, just red velvet and a cold stinson beach sunrise immediate learnings: 1. it's much easier to direct when you're not also in the shots :) 2. sunrise comes fast and then, poof, it's gone 3. even for experiments, be crazy prepared: have a run of show, assign roles, brief everyone the day before especially if you're learning on the job 4. experiment experiment experiment 5. some of the best shots were unplanned 6. looking through footage takes a lot of time i will try to share more behind the scenes and learnings in the coming weeks & months if I can avoid spoilers thanks @olivewithatie @kabojanowska for jumping into the ocean in the name of art, @elisamuelsson for your amazing camera work, and @brandonkachen for sick drone capture

if you’re in tech and writing a screenplay send me it and I’ll return handwritten notes scripts@svfilm.fund

unfortunately, what they don't tell you about being creative + having a non-undemanding job is that literally all of your time will be Work. when you are not working your job, you must spend those precious moments on your Creative Work. it is intense and tiring and feels like real work, because it is not relegated to hobby status fortunately, it is always worth it.

love this acct & WKW but the uncomfortable answer is AI already can yearn and will have the ability to make films equally as distinctive, memorable, and emotionally impactful as working filmmakers today. I don’t think the “but can it do this” narrative serves us anymore in 2026. audiences will watch great films regardless, AI will make great films. what will be more interesting is seeing to what extent culture prizes 100% human-authored films (screenplay fully authored + on-set direction with live actors). and to what extent hybrid films see adoption. wouldn’t be surprised if you see a “Generated” category at Cannes in 2035 when AI is steered by a seriously trained director.

if you overhear most ppl, they’re likely just discussing what they’re going to consume next. something like: “we should do this.” “i’m going there next week.” “did you see that movie?” “we’re trying this restaurant.” “i might go to italy.” it’s rare to find ppl that tend to discuss what they’re trying to change, create, or understand way way more.

now we need one in San Francisco